Amazon.  The Behemoth of Booksellers.  The Disruptor of Retail.   The Patron Saint of the US Postal Service (their Prime saved USPS’s bacon). Amazon. The Paragon of Predictive Analytics.  The Role Model of Recommendation Systems. Given Amazon’s obsession with data and…

Driving a Rover on Mars? Touring Valen's Reef in the Bird’s Head Seascape international preserve? Reliving Hurricane Sandy as the waters rose? I had a chance to experience all three of these in virtual reality (VR) at the 2016 Aspen Ideas Festival.  All three experiences would have been…

Adam Grant is a supremely practical management guru with a well-deserved reputation based on his popularity as the youngest full professor at Wharton Business School, two best-selling books and a much-read Sunday New York Times contributor. (He might be the next Peter Drucker.) My very first BTBI…

If attending the Aspen Ideas Festival isn’t on your bucket list, you might consider adding it. Every summer, one thousand movers and shakers, CEOs, authors, politicians, pundits, and artists gather to share the biggest ideas of the day and seek solutions to the world’s pressing problems. I had…

Being the head of a productivity center, I am on a lifelong quest to increase my own productivity and happiness. I never seem to get enough done: my “to do” list is always bigger than my “TA DA – it’s done!” list. Imagine my delight when Charles Duhigg, Pulitzer Prize winning author of the…

I am willing to bet that machines wrote some of the emails, spider crawls, and media alerts that come across your screen every day. A grizzled sports writer didn’t write the recap of the baseball game; most weather alerts and forecasts weren’t written by a meteorologist; financial analyses and…

(Third and final installment in my series on Chip Conley and Airbnb) I tease Chip Conley that it seems to be his destiny to be a serial disruptor of the hospitality industry, first as founder and former CEO of Joie de Vivre, the second largest boutique hotel company in America, and now as the…

(Part Two of a three-part series on Chip Conley and Airbnb.) Building trust and engagement—something every KM and community manager should know how to do, right? It never goes away as a hot issue and continues to be one of the most-asked questions APQC gets from our customers. APQC has provided…

(The first of a three-part series on lessons from the sharing economy for the way we work.) Airbnb's Workspace of the Future Last week, I was treated to an inside look at the headquarters of Airbnb—an icon of the new sharing economy. The home-sharing Internet behemoth has hosts and rentals…

Virtually every mature KM program has or wants a social collaboration aspect, via SharePoint, Yammer, a wiki, or any one of the myriad open source or inexpensive proprietary and public social networking sites. Employees want to connect as easily at the office as they do in their personal life for a…